Bearing the scars of conflict

Visual Arts/Aidan Dunn: The Disputed Territory in Anthony Haughey's exhibition is a general term for several sites of former conflict in contemporary Europe.

Reviewed: Disputed Territory, Anthony Haughey, Gallery of Photography until April 15 (01-6714654); I Am Here Somewhere, Clodagh Emoe, Temple Bar Gallery until April 8 (01-6710073); The Lake, Stephen Loughman, Kevin Kavanagh until Mar 25 (01-8740064)

Made over a period of several years, his work records landscapes and events that we generally do not see because they are not newsworthy in conventional terms. He shows us areas in Ireland, Bosnia and Kosovo following the conclusion of violence, subsequent to the departure of the world's media, scenes of aftermath rather than action.

We have never been so inundated with photographic imagery as we are at this point in our history. Digital media have created something close to a climate of universal depiction.

Yet just as digital imagery - generally of poor optical quality - has become pervasive, many photographers have become increasingly wary of conventional pictorial narratives. Whereas in the past it seemed desirable to tell simplified stories in a summary fashion in iconic images, now a whole generation of photographers has grown up with an inbuilt scepticism about such images. Haughey is one of those who sets out to reconsider the way photography is used to convey information about the world.

The largest piece in the exhibition, Resolution, made in co-operation with the International Centre for Missing Persons, is an audio-visual installation. Both symbolic and exemplary of myriad, fragmentary details, multiple electrical leads snake their way to a series of tiny backlit screens distributed irregularly on a wall and the floor of the gallery.

Each screen features a single image of an object, such as a pocket knife or a cigarette lighter, or a part of a human body with a distinctive marking, such as a tattoo or a scar. On a larger monitor we see a technician sifting carefully through soil-stained clothing. An audio recording recounts first-hand, hair-raising stories of survival and escape in the midst of massacres. The objects and details we see are used as a means of identifying the dead. Relatives of missing individuals can sift through albums of such details.

In his large format colour photographs, Haughey tends to focus on things that are at first glance innocuous or peripheral: a scattering of metal scraps on a piece of burnt scrubland, or a field at the edge of a town churned into muddy heaps of earth.

In each case he is inviting us to ask why. The metal scraps are all that remain of a heap of incinerated files in Bosnia Herzegovina, while the field adjoins the Garvaghy Road at Drumcree and its disarray relates to the efforts of British army engineers to prevent the Orange Order marching in August 2002.

Recurrently he alternates between the long view and the fragmentary close-up, avoiding easily readable constructions. There is a certain uneasiness about his images that that surely derives from his own wary uneasiness: a sense that he is carefully picking his way through a problematic landscape. Disputed Territory is a compelling exhibition.

In I Am Here Somewhere, Clodagh Emoe suggests a correspondence between physical and mental spaces. The human effort to grasp the immensity of the physical world symbolises and is perhaps interchangeable with the effort to grasp our existential predicament. In both cases she sees us teetering on the edge of an immense nothingness, a void, to which we are, of course, irresistibly drawn. There is a retrospective quality to many of her pieces, and perhaps a nostalgia for an era of epic, confident exploration.We see old documentary footage of mountaineers ascending a Himalayan peak (perhaps Everest - the mountain is not identified). The title, Past the Point of No Return, suggests that they are setting off into an unknown.

Equally, the writer of the text partly legible on the disintegrating pages of a yellowing volume of The Approach to Philosophy steps with great sureness into the cognitive reaches.

A video piece, The End is in the Beginning, and works called The Change of Heart introduce a different note, further undercutting the idea of heroic endeavour and any assumed confidence about our place in the universe. The French artist Yves Klein famously staged a Leap into the Void, in fact a jump from a high window, a work which understandably resulted in injury.

In Emoe's video a figure comically scrambles back up a variety of edifices, thinking better of a leap into the unknown. The artist herself makes a number of deft moves and conceptual leaps in what is a fine solo show.

In his exhibition, The Lake, Stephen Loughman presents us with a series of paintings that may or may not be sequential steps in a narrative sequence. His images are expertly made and draw on cinematic conventions, but in a stylised way. That is, he announces the artifice of what he is doing at the outset. We know we are looking at contrived scenes and we can guess that they are not going to link up into a coherent, linear plot. Rather, he is drawing our attention to the way narratives are set up via structured images.

An empty pub interior leads on to two moderately creepy landscapes set deep in forestry plantations. A full moon glows through tree tops. A baby sleeps peacefully. A cabin looms in the mist, illuminated from within. Leaves undulate beneath the surface of The Lake. A rope dangles in the water . . . and so on.

The work depends on our not being able to put two and two together. Loughman must be able to generate a strong sense of narrative associations and expectations without sacrificing the meaning of his images to a functional role in an actual narrative. Once an image has done its job in narrative terms it's finished.

With The Lake, we are suspended within an extended moment of uneasy anticipation. The show is pretty much, and very satisfactorily, a composite installation, and the pictures work best in each other's company.